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'Blood on the Border': Anti-Immigrant Violence Looms

A French novel, The Camp of the Saints, has become the favorite racist fantasy of the anti-immigrant movement in the US. Published by The Social Contract Press, the book is revered by American white supremacists.

Mexicans as 'Cultural Cancer' Racist organizations like the CCC and the New Century Foundation have certainly helped beat the drum of anger at non-white immigrants, reaching thousands of people on the hard right with their messages.

But in many ways, it has been in a different milieu — in the circle of ostensibly more "mainstream" anti-immigration groups like AICF — that this movement has grown strong.

Vinson's videotape, "Immigration: Making America Less Beautiful?", is a lurid vision of barbarians at the gate — and a classic example of the harsh anti-immigration propaganda now making the rounds.

To the strains of "America the Beautiful," it opens with Old Glory flapping, the U.S. Capitol, colonial houses and quiet streets. Suddenly, the music changes.

In Mexico, rough soldiers are saluting menacingly as they march by in red berets. Now, back to the Capitol, "America the Beautiful," blond-haired white kids tumbling down a slide. Then, to the border: a scary nightscope shot of Mexican illegals pouring across the line.

In a little while, a weeping woman will describe her son's murder by a "gang of illegals."

Glenn Spencer's Voices of Citizens Together (VCT) almost makes AICF look tame by comparison. A Mexican invasion, Spencer warns in his own videotape, is racing across America "like wildfire." There are drugs in Iowa, gang takeovers in Nevada, and "traitors" in the Democratic Party, the Catholic Church and among the "corporate globalists."

Bringing crime, drugs, squalor and "immigration via the birth canal," Mexicans are a "cultural cancer" from which Western civilization "must be rescued." They are threatening the birthright left by the white colonists who "earned the right to stewardship of the land." And this invasion is no accident.

Working in league with communist Chicano activists and their allies in America, Spencer warns, Mexico is using a little-known but highly effective plan — a scheme already successful in "seizing power" in California — "to defeat America."

The name of the conspiracy is the "Plan de Aztlán."

Plots, Plans and Racist Fantasies "Some scoff at the idea of a Mexican plan of conquest," says Spencer's video (which also features a scuffle between VCT and antiracist activists). The video then answers with an assortment of sound bites from Latino activists and Mexican officials — including references to "la reconquista" (the reconquest) — that "prove" that there is a Mexican plot to break the Southwestern states away.

A "hostile force on our border," the narrator warns, is engaging in "demographic war" against the United States. "Mexico is moving to capture the American Southwest."

Variations on this Aztlán conspiracy theory are now widespread on the American radical right. Columnists like Francis and Joseph E. Fallon, who has written on the subject for journals including American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly, a publication specializing in race "science," have helped to publicize variations of the theory.

Even Michael Hill, president of the League of the South, a racist but relatively sober "pro-South" group, warns of plots by forces "overtly hostile to our civilization."

"Already," he says, "radical Latinos have launched a Reconquista of our southern borders, especially from Texas to California."

Older ideas, too, are animating radical nativists today.

In 1973, a Frenchman named Jean Raspail published a book called Le Camp des Saints. It was a racist fantasy novel about the fate of Western civilization when lazy and degenerate Third World hordes invade — a tale of the rape of France and the rest of the white world at the hands of the dark races.

Critics denounced it soon after publication, and it went out of print in French.

But in 1975, Raspail's book appeared for the first time in English as The Camp of the Saints, and within a few years it had been republished by Vinson's AICF and, in 1995, an anti-immigration outfit called The Social Contract Press (TSCP).

It wasn't long before the National Alliance was describing the book as one of the most important "racialist" novels of the century, along with The Turner Diaries, the infamous race war novel written by Alliance leader William Pierce.

Today, The Camp of the Saints is a key text for extremists — the Turner Diaries of the racist anti-immigrant right.

To some, it is a text to be taken literally.

"The Camp of the Saints is coming our way," TSCP Editor Wayne Lutton warned a national Council of Conservative Citizens conference in 1997. "They have declared racial demographic war against us. It's up to us to respond.

"Why are their populations exploding? Because of us. Our people have exported our medical technology. We feed them. Had we left them alone, many of them would be going extinct today. Can you imagine AIDS raging through Africa?"